Written by Gabrielle Archambault
Edited by Giuliana Garofalo
February 6, 2019
The access to higher education for Canadian women is one of the great transformations of the late nineteenth century. The gradual integration of women in Canadian institutions of higher education would result in members of the female student body to achieve the highest levels of their professions, including McGill’s very own “unwavering trailblazer,” Maude Abbott, who graduated from McGill with a Bachelor of Arts in 1890.
In Canada, colleges began offering partial studies for women in the 1860s, with the approval of prominent educators, including Egerton Ryerson, Chief Superintendent of schools in Upper Canada, and the Minister of Education in Upper Canada, George Ross, who participated in lively debates about whether or not to adopt co- education in universities (Gillett, p. 11). The first Canadian institution of higher education to accept female students was Mount Allison University, located in New Brunswick, in 1872 (McCargar, p. 6). Mount Allison was also the first college in the British Empire to award a Bachelor’s degree to a woman, Gracie Annie Lockhart, who graduated with a Bachelor of Science in 1875 (Gillett, p. 11). The first Bachelor of Arts given to a Canadian woman was bestowed upon Harriet Stewart seven years later, in 1882, also conferred by Mount Allison University. Barriers fell once again the following year, when Victoria College, in Cobourg, Ontario, became the first institution in Canada to award a woman, Augusta Stowe, with a medical degree (Gillett, p. 11). In 1884, one female student at Nova Scotia’s Acadia University, as well as two other women studying at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, graduated with a Bachelor of Arts. The following year, Dalhousie awarded one woman with a Bachelor of Arts degree, while the University of Toronto granted five. In 1886, Toronto’s Trinity College gave the first female Bachelor of Music degree (Gillett, p. 11). With all of these changes happening at once in the early to mid-1880s, McGill became intrigued. The first class of female students graduated from McGill in 1888, making McGill the first university in the Province of Québec to accept women, whereas other, prestigious French- language universities waited until the first decades of the twentieth century. L’Université Laval, for instance, began accepting female students in 1910, and l’Université de Montréal commenced female enrollment in 1915 (Gillett, p. 11).
Grace Annie Lockhart (1855- 1916) became the first woman in the British Empire to receive a Bachelor’s degree.
While the process of allowing female students to study at McGill was slow, as early as the 1870s, professors from the Faculty of Arts and Sciences began offering university-level lectures to members of the Montreal Ladies’ Educational Association, an institution that happened to be co- founded by Margaret Mercer Dawson, the wife of the McGill principal (Gillett, p. 35). It was during one of these lectures that John William Dawson expressed his disappointment at women not being allowed to study at McGill: “the dawn of a new education era, which, in my judgment, will see as great an advance in the education of our race as that which was inaugurated by the revival of learning and the establishment of universities for men in the previous age” (“Blazing Trails”). Dawson himself was quite progressive for his time, as he frequently spoke and wrote about the education of women more than any other McGill principal before or after him (Gillett, p. 35). According to Margaret Gillett, former Professor of Education at McGill and founding editor of the McGill Journal of Education, Principal Dawson was “sensitive to the fact that this was one of the significant pedagogic issues of the nineteenth century” (Gillett, p. 35).
Women being integrated into the student body at McGill was sparked by a series of gradual steps. The first was the McGill Normal School, established in 1857, which offered the first English-language professional training in Montreal for women. The school, considered the predecessor to McGill’s current Faculty of Education, was administered by Mary McCracken (“Blazing Trails”, Gillett, p. 40). In 1870, the Montreal Ladies Educational Association (MLEA) was founded with the cooperation of McGill University. The association included 167 women members within the first year of its opening. The committee consisted of prominent middle and upper class English-speaking Montrealers, with names including Molson, Redpath, Atwater, Greene and Dawson. In the winter of 1871, MLEA began offering university-level courses to its female members and, while it was “something less than a true college for women, the MLEA was an undoubted success” because the organization was managed and supported by the women themselves (Gillett, p. 56). The Association lasted for fourteen years, sometimes offering four or more courses taught by McGill professors (Gillett, p. 58).
The McGill Normal School, Belmont Street, Montreal.
Based on the effects of the Normal School and the Educational Association, the Committee of Corporation upon the Higher Education of Women was formed in October 1882. Principal Dawson and other professors gathered to express their view on the pressing issue and, from the negotiations of 1882 and 1883, came the promise of allowing female students to attend classes at McGill. These four women- Rosalie McLea, Octavia Ritchie, Alice Murray and Helen Reid- came from the Montreal High School for Girls after receiving high grades on their examinations (Gillett, p. 67). While most university presidents preferred separate colleges for women to avoid coeducation, McGill was the only college that could afford to do so because of a donation from Donald Smith, a Scottish- Canadian businessman and railway tycoon. With the financial support of one of the British Empire’s most sought-out investors and philanthropists, the women were enrolled in the “Donald Special Course for Women.” Additionally, other members of the MLEA were also admitted as “Occasionals,” and could be eligible for a certificate if they passed the required examination (Gillett, pp. 25, 74).
The time for women to attend classes at McGill arrived in autumn of 1884 and every female student throughout the 1880s and 1890s, whether an undergraduate or “Occasional,” was referred as a “Donalda” (Gillett, p.74). The Donaldas attended separate classes, though they did not go unnoticed on campus. While the women were “at first blushingly self- conscious,” they “soon grew indifferent to the refrain,” despite their presence being “a source of great diversion for men” (Gillett, p. 93). For the Donaldas, McGill was “male domain” and, as a consequence, these women had a significant amount of determination to overcome doubts and reservations from their friends or mothers, as many women in Montreal disapproved of their daughters going to college (Gillett, p. 94). One must also highlight that McGill’s first female students did receive considerable praise for their accomplishment from male students, to which one woman wrote: “the gentlemen undergraduates […] have shown kindly feeling on every possible occasion” (Gillet, p. 100).
The Donaldas’ first graduating class, 1888.
Among the Donaldas’ first graduating class of 1888, some married, while others became teachers or went on to attend graduate school to become experts in their respective field of study (Gillett, p.108). However, according to Victorian ideals, it was widely believed that a woman who became a scholar was and would remain single; “loveless, husbandless, childless.” Thus, the fear of being educated and unmarriageable was “real and pervasive” (Gillett, p. 15). Among the class of 1888, four out of eight women did marry, and this 50% figure persisted until the early 1920s, when it reached 45%. While the risk of becoming an “old maid” remained omnipresent, Gillett notes that women were happy at McGill. Moreover, throughout the 1890s, the Donaldas continued to do well in their classes and, by 1917, women outnumbered men in the Faculty of Arts. In 1946, there were two thousand women at McGill pursuing different faculties, degrees, programs and specialized courses (Gillet, pp. 151, 186, 199). By the end of the Second World War, the idea of separate education was “simply unworkable,” as the effects of the First and Second World War had shaken the social fabric of the university, which allowed for even greater mixing.
Sources:
“Blazing Trails: McGill’s Women.” McGill Library. March 14, 2012. Accessed January 16, 2019. https://www.mcgill.ca/about/history/features/mcgill-women.
Cook, Sharon Anne, Lorna R. McLean, and Kate O’Rourke. Framing Our Past: Constructing Canadian Women’s History in the Twentieth Century. Montreal: McGill- Queen’s University Press, 2001.
Gillett, Margaret. We Walked Very Warily: A History of Women at McGill. Montreal, Canada: Eden Press Women’s Publications, 1981.
McCargar, Marilla. “Femininity and Higher Education: Women at Ontario Universities, 1890 to 1920.” The University of Western Ontario, April 2016. Accessed January 16, 2019. https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=5253&context=etd.
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